Human and Smart Machine Co-Learning: Brain-Computer Interaction at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics

Machine learning has recently become very popular in cybernetics systems, but it has always been considered an important research area in the computational intelligence field. Nevertheless, when it comes to smart machines, it is not just about methodologies; we also need to consider systems, cybernetics, and sometimes even humans. Rerni Coulom, a freelance developer of Go programs, notes, "Online games are usually played at a faster pace, which favors the computer over humans," and, still, he expects a strong correlation in performance in serious tournament games. Smart machines were one of the main themes at IEEE SMC 2017. In an effort to attract more attention from worldwide scholars to the event, a study on Go players competing with and learning from smart machines was held. There were 15 games played: the amateur Go players won eight games against DDF with the small computational resource, but DeepZenGo won all seven games against the invited professional Go players. Therefore, DeepZenGo could be used as a coach for the professional Go players, while DDF with a small machine could learn from the amateur Go players as long as we properly and adaptively adjusted the computational resources of the intelligent robot. Figures 7 and 8 include photos from this special event. In the future, the research team will apply this technology to education, e.g., with children playing games to enhance concentration on learning mathematics, languages, and other topics. Looking ahead, using detected brainwaves, a robot will be able to assist a teacher during class and speak for a student.